Saturdays weren’t easy for Michigan commitments this fall. While most of the 2014 class was in place before the season began, the players’ dream of basking in the Wolverines’ success didn’t play out exactly as planned with a 7-5 season.

Players set up a group text, and comments flew back and forth during games.

“We’re basically like a brotherhood,” Southfield defensive lineman Lawrence Marshall said Thursday at the Dearborn Inn, where he was honored at the Detroit Free Press/National Football Foundation awards banquet, as a member of the prep dream team. “We talk everyday, every single day, about school, when we get up to Michigan, everything.

“So we’re going through a rough time right now, and next year we plan to be back on top.”

Official visit weekend for most of the class begins today, and the focus for U-M is the nation’s No. 2 overall player, New Jersey cornerback Jabrill Peppers, who has indicated he might keep his options open.

Whereas official visit weekends in the past were about initial recruiting, this one is about re-recruiting.

“When I’ve been texting him, we basically talk about Michigan — we don’t talk about him taking official visits to other schools,” Marshall said. “This weekend we wanted to talk and reassure everything’s OK.”

Marshall, who won’t enroll until the fall, said he has been working on “lifting weights, speed and agility and yoga. Basically everybody keeps telling me you’ve got to be more flexible, so I’m trying to do some yoga.”

That flexibility will be important in his sales job as well, as his high school teammate, defensive lineman Malik McDowell, is one of the elite-level prospects U-M is still recruiting.